The World Views of the U.S. Presidential Election: 2008 Book

This isn't a book I can really recommend to casual readers, even casual readers who are interested in environmental history. It is just so dense. Part of the problem might be that it is a translation, but part of it is also that there really isn't a narrative through-line...Radkau has a point to make about environmental history, and he provides example after example after example of that point.
It's a good point though. This is an interesting read after something like "Mosquito Empires," which was more of a determinist sort of environmental history. "Mosquito Empires" was about how ecological developments in the Americas (basically the rise of malaria and yellow fever) affected 18th and 19th century American history. The people in "Empires" didn't know they were creating conditions that fostered disease though - that book isn't really about human decision making. "Nature and Power" is about human responses to ecological crises, and how those responses have tended to be all wrapped up in issues of state power and financial interests, and how those responses have tended to address one problem while creating new problems. The underlying message is that human history and natural history are inseparable. An environmental history cannot, therefore, be merely a history of environmental occurrences; it must "become a history of human nature," and examine the ways people have interacted with their environments, altering them and sometimes being conditioned by them. This means that environmental historians cannot work in isolation from political, economic, or social historians. The field must work in concert with these other fields, and in fact (as Radkau demonstrates throughout) it can globalize these fields, providing countless cross-national comparisons of societal responses in various continents and epochs to floods, or deforestation, or epidemic disease.
This book also tries to take the focus off America a bit, and focus on the "old world." Environmentalism in the USA tends to be about protecting "wilderness," and the very concept of wilderness "makes no sense in the environmental history of the Old World." (It also doesn't make much sense in the environmental history of the New World...it encourages the false notion that Europeans found a primitive untouched wilderness when they arrived in the Americas) Instead of concentrating on separating people from landscapes, Radkau argues that we should study the way people have interacted with landscapes for hundreds (and thousands) of years. This is valuable...this point and some of his illustrations of it are probably what will stick with me from the book.